Macmillan Issues New Contract Boilerplate for All Divisions, E-Royalty Lower than RH, S&S, Other Majors

Agents are poring over a new contract boilerplate issued by Macmillan, parent company of St. Martin's, Farrar Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt, Picador, and Tor among others. The contract files were emailed to agents on Monday (October 26th) with a covering note from Macmillan CEO John Sargent (link at bottom of this post).

Sargent highlights key elements in the homogenization of the contract forms, namely: 1) a new across-the-board (all Macmillan divisions) e-book royalty; 2) a new across-the-board direct-to-consumer royalty; and 3) enhanced promotional and Internet marketing initiatives.

The e-book royalty will come as the biggest surprise to e-book royalty watchers, as it goes contrary to the trend (which some think is a polite word for something darker) among major publishers to pay 25% of net e-book receipts to authors. Unfortunately, Macmillan offers even less than that - 20%.

It will be interesting to see if Macmillan will hold the line at an e-book royalty below that of its playmates such as Random House and Simon & Schuster, who in the last year have reduced their e-book royalties to 25% of net receipts. It will be even more interesting to see if the agents fall into the trap of accepting 25% as the "standard" e-book royalty. Who says that's all it should be? (Full disclosure, E-Reads pays 50% of net receipts to its authors, and always has.)

As for direct-to-consumer sales, the new royalty is 10% of net receipts on the first 10,000 copies and 15% thereafter. The standard for as long as anyone can remember has been 5%. That low number was created in an era of mail order of hard copies, a cost-intensive process that was often generated by full color magazine ads, coupons, and other expensive forms of solicitation. This process will now yield to cheaper Web solicitations and streamlined delivery systems.

Buried deep in this change of royalty is the intriguing prospect that Macmillan might be moving toward a more aggressive approach to selling its books direct to consumers, a strategy from which many publishers have shrunk out of fear of upsetting Barnes & Noble and Amazon by competing with them. There is good reason to shrink, as Penguin discovered in April 2008 when Amazon threw an elbow at them over this very issue.

Nevertheless, if Macmillan is any bellwether, publishers may be gearing up for a push on direct-to-consumer sales. The prize? Nothing short of survival. See Direct Sales: Publishing's Last Stand.

Here's the link to Sargent's letter, reproduced in full.

Richard Curtis

The E-book Reader That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Do you know how to pronounce Scribd? Does it rhyme with "scribed"? Or "fibbed"? I've even heard it called "Scrib-dee".

How about Que, Plastic Logic's forthcoming e-book reader? Is it pronounced "Kay"? or "Cue"?

Next is the Flepia, Fujitsu's e-book reader. Is it Fleh-pia or Flee-pia?

Or the UK e-book reader called the Cool-er. As we recently wondered (see Another E-Book Reader with a Dumb Name), is that pronounced "color" (the device screen is black and white by the way)? Or do you pronounce it like the refrigerated water dispenser commonly found in business offices, suggesting it's cooler than the Kindle? Or maybe you come to a full glottal stop, thus: Cool. Er.

If I were a technology company investing millions of dollars to develop a device or service or product, it would make sense for me to ask a focus group to review it. And to make sure that focus group is stocked with people with dirty minds. Like Charles Curtis's.

Charles Curtis believes there is money to be made helping corporations avoid selecting embarrassing names for their products. He would call his service "Double Entendre Consulting". "The concept," he explains, "is this: say you're a startup with a company name, logo, slogan but you're nervous that there's something hidden in it that will make you a laughingstock. So you pay my company a fee and I, along with my fellow gross-minded colleagues, will review your selections and tell you if they're clean or if they will become fodder for viral hilarity on the Internet."

For example? "If Kids Exchange had hired us, we would have informed them that their URL, kidsexchange.net, spelled out something very different from what they intended. Same goes for an outfit called Who Represents? Their URL is Whorepresents.com.

"This idea came up in college when I used to frequent a fast food joint that prided itself on making great salads. Unfortunately, their slogan was, 'The Original Salad Tossers'. If you don't understand why that's so hilarious, click here. When I went back there years later, the slogan on their napkins had changed, so perhaps someone had informed them that sickos such as myself were rolling on the floor every time we mentioned their slogan. And teabagging? The Republicans, should have consulted me before they began advocating that practice. Click here to learn why."

Full disclosure Number 1: I sired this person. Full disclosure #2: if he does go into the double entendre business I intend to become a serious investor, because I think there's a fortune to be made in exposing dumb names. Which leads us to The Nook.

Charles does not mention what he would have said to Barnes & Noble had they consulted with him about The Nook, BN.Com's newly minted and named e-book reader. But he might consider employing a blogger named Charissa, who wrote the following Open Letter to Barnes & Noble:

Dear Barnes & Noble,

What were you thinking?

Who on earth thought it would be a good idea to name you new E-Reader device the nook? I mean, really? Do you know anything about pop culture and slang from the last few decades? I would love to know what kind of focus groups you used to demo the name and marketing, or did you use focus groups at all? Because I don’t know who wouldn’t have told you this is a bad idea.

And did you even give a thought to what your booksellers are going to have to endure, answering questions about the nook(ie)? Not to mention all the jokes they’re going to be subject to. Trust me, there is an endless supply of nook jokes out there, from the innocent “nook, nook” jokes to more suggestive humor.

Not to mention the fact that within less than 24 hours of the nook’s announcement, some anonymous B&N employees have already begun re-writing Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie” in honor of the nook. Do you realize how obnoxious it is to have the words, “And you can take you Kindle and stick it up your…” stuck in your head all day long?

And it’s really bad that the device itself doesn’t even come out until the end of November and I’m already having trouble using the name in a sentence with a straight face. We still have more than a month of nook jokes to go.

I realize it’s too late to change the name now, but I really hope next time you’re a little more careful when selecting the name of something as monumental to the company as this device apparently is.

Sincerely,
A Concerned Citizen

PS – If you were to, say, give out free nooks to all your employees in an effort to encourage them to familiarize themselves with the device for customer questions, then I would be more than willing to forgive you for this minor naming indiscretion.

We wish the best of success to the makers of the Flepia, Que, Cool-er and Nook. They should be aware, though, that had they hired Double Entendre Consulting they might have avoided becoming, in the words of W. S. Gilbert, "a source of innocent merriment."

Richard Curtis, President of E-Reads (which is pronounced "Ee-Reeds", not "Eh-Reds")

The Medium is The Screen. The Message is Distraction

"My own research shows that people are continually distracted when working with digital information. They switch simple activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes. It’s just not possible to engage in deep thought about a topic when we’re switching so rapidly."

That observation was made by Gloria Mark, a University of California professor who studies human-computer interaction. But it is also the collective verdict of five experts invited by the New York Times to participate in a debate entitled Does the Brain Like E-Books?. We briefly posted about it the other day but after examining the transcript we feel the contents of the "debate" deserve closer attention. The reason we put "debate" in quotation marks is that there doesn't seem to be much disagreement about the conclusion that "watching books", as we call it, compromises our ability to immerse ourselves in books. This is particularly true for children.

Sandra Aamodt, former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, writes that "people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent... Distractions abound online — costing time and interfering with the concentration needed to think about what you read."

Concentrating on serious reading and avoiding distraction "depends on the user's strength of character," she says. Her comment reflects the theme of Distraction by Mark Curtis (no relation), the book pictured here, namely, that "a new sense of discipline is required to prevent us drowning in distraction."

Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, points out that "No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain." But "my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps, videos (in the new vooks)."

"The child’s imagination and children’s nascent sense of probity and introspection are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it."

Finally, David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, writes that

The most important ongoing change to reading itself in today’s online environment is the cheapening of the word. In teaching college students to write, I tell them (as teachers always have) to make every word count, to linger on each phrase until it is right, to listen to the sound of each sentence.

But these ideas seem increasingly bizarre in a world where (in any decent-sized gathering of students) you can practically see the text messages buzz around the room and bounce off the walls, each as memorable as a housefly; where the narrowing time between writing for and publishing on the Web is helping to kill the art of editing by crushing it to death. The Internet makes words as cheap and as significant as Cheese Doodles

As e-books move out of their infancy and into a dominant role in the reading life of our society, it is imperative that we recognize the significant psychological differences between reading on screen and reading on paper.

Professor Gloria Mark, deeply concerned about the distractions engendered by screen media, expresses her own preference: "I’d much rather curl up in an easy chair with a paper book. It’s not only an escape into a world of literature but it’s an escape from my digital devices."

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

"Watching" Books on E-Devices Debated in NYTimes

A year ago in a posting called Watching Books I wrote,

Reading text on a screen without sound, color, or movement, one develops the uneasy feeling that something is missing. We wonder, Is that all there is? I’m not a psychologist but it seems more than likely that we are bringing to text viewed on screens the same expectations we bring to television, movie and computer screens. Indeed, something is missing! How can we not be disappointed - even, God help us, bored - when these blocks of words fail to stimulate the same intense response as a YouTube video? We are trying to extract a linear experience out of a nonlinear medium

Today the New York Times, in an online feature called "Room for Debate", began exploring the psychological issues arising out of reading e-books, touching in depth on many of the issues I explored in that first stab at understanding the new medium in which we have all been immersed.

"Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper?" the Times's editors ask. "Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium?"

Participating in the discussion/debate are:

* Alan Liu, English professor
* Sandra Aamodt, author, “Welcome to Your Brain”
* Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development
* David Gelernter, computer scientist
* Gloria Mark, professor of informatics

Does the Brain Like E-Books? is a significant must-read debate that may well affect the way we read in the 21st century.

Richard Curtis

Sergey Brin Sticks it to Google Settlement Critics

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has posted an op-ed editorial in the New York Times urging the book community not to lose what could well be a once-in-history opportunity to rescue the content of millions of book from obscurity.

"The vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries," he points out. "Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down."

Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.

Brin recounts other tragic losses of historical and literary heritage including the library at Alexandria and, of more recent vintage, the United States Library of Congress.

Assuring us that us that "nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort," Brin reminds us that "Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks."

Brin concludes with the hope that destruction of significant libraries "never happens again, but history would suggest otherwise. More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact in the world’s foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily. Many companies, libraries and organizations will play a role in saving and making available the works of the 20th century. Together, authors, publishers and Google are taking just one step toward this goal, but it’s an important step. Let’s not miss this opportunity."

Read Brin's editorial in full in A Library to Last Forever. E-Reads supports the settlement worked out in good faith by the author and publishing community seeking to protect our precious legacy of books. And we take a dim view of the motives of some who have criticized the settlement simply because they didn't think of it first and didn't bestir themselves to do anything about orphaned books until Google demonstrated there's money to be made in them. For more about that, you can click here.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Your Book is Just Words? Sorry, Chum, We're Rejecting It

Some ten years ago, in an article entitled Author? What's an Author? I asked, "How can you possibly call yourself an author if you can't process digitized full-motion video signals on your computer, accelerate your image-compression manager to thirty frames per second, and enhance your video with full stereo sound?"

The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works. As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century's definition of "author" will be as far from today's definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.

That day has come.

I didn't have a word for the medium I foresaw, but last spring someone coined it "vook", a hybrid (video + book = "vook") blending traditional books with audio, video and other digital media, a little like the centaur pictured here. The term is so new that if you google it you'll be asked "Do you mean book?".

Today's news brings tidings that Simon & Schuster "is working with a multimedia partner to release four 'vooks,' which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read — and viewed — online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch." Mokoto Rich, who covers the book scene (soon to be "vook scene"?) for the New York Times, describes it in Curling Up With Hybrid Books, Videos Included, which the newspaper's editors felt deserved front page status - front page, that is, of the entire newspaper. Rich quotes Judith Curr, publisher of S&S imprint Atria Books and a prime mover behind S&S's vook releases: “You can’t just be linear anymore with your text.”

For all who toil in the two dimensions of the printed word, that's a pretty depressing statement. The paradigm shift that seemed like a science fictioneer's fantasy not long ago is now upon us and what was a simple world of Me Author/You Publisher has become a white water rapids of identities in crisis, including those of literary agents. Agents get agita when they're not sure who's the seller and who's the buyer, and digital technology is dissolving the barrier between the two like battery acid.

Is the game over? Is it Death of the Book Time?

In my opinion? Not even close.

Let's keep a few things in perspective. The most important is the distinction between reading and watching. Intoxicated though publishers may be with this new and admittedly exciting hybrid world, in time they will come around to the immutable truth that books - plain old linear text printed on bound sheets of white paper - offer an immersive experience for which there is no substitute. When an amazon.com reviewer of a vook proclaims "“It really makes a story more real if you know what the characters look like,” we rise up in wrathful indignation. For nothing - nothing whatsoever - makes a story more real than what we imagine the characters to look like. Viewing a video of a book, or about a book, or with a book, may be entertaining. But it is not reading. It is simply, as I have written elsewhere, Watching Books.

Any reader who has been lost in a book would not dream of breaking the spell by clicking, searching, supplementing, accessing, googling, listening or viewing. Hell, any reader who has been lost in a book does not even want to break the spell by breathing. Maybe we'll be compelled to do some surfing and clicking when we finish reading, but just as likely we simply want to digest what we've read, or think about it, or reread it, or maybe talk to someone about it.

Nothing can or will take the place of books, and nothing ever will. Vooks are cool but they do not communicate ideas, transport us to magical worlds or immerse us in wonder. Watch a vook, play with it, interact with it. When you're finished, shut your computer down and settle in with a good book.

Richard Curtis